Who was here first? The two meanings of ‘Indigenous’ in Europe

Popular culture taught generations to admire resistance to colonialism; nationalism turned ‘firstness’ into claims of exclusive ownership

Originally published on Global Voices

A performance at the Karl May Festival in Bad Segeberg , Germany, in 2007. European books, films, comics and public performances created their own imagined version of the American West. Photo by Roan Shryne on Wikimedia Commons . Public domain.

For many Europeans, the word “Indigenous” evokes two very different meanings. One is about distant, partly fictional and very much romanticized communities defending their land against colonizers, acquired through tales of adventure from American and European pulp fiction, novels, movies and comics. The other is much closer to home: nationalist claims of being “autochthonous” — supposed descendants of “original” inhabitants whose blood is linked to the soil of their country — accompanied by arguments that “others” (usually neighboring peoples or recent migrants) arrived later and therefore possess weaker rights to the same territory. The Balkans provide a particularly striking example of how these ideas can coexist and be abused, but they are not just a Balkan exception.

An important distinction is easily lost in translation. In international human rights usage, Indigenous Peoples are not simply those who can prove that their ancestors arrived first. There is no single universal definition, but the concept includes self-identification, historical continuity with pre-colonial societies, distinct cultural or political institutions, close relationships with land, and experiences of conquest or marginalization.

As explained by social scientists Maykel Verkuyten and Jochem Thijs from Utrecht University, autochthony and political nativism operate differently: they divide residents into a natural “host” population and conditional “guests.” Autochthony belief, they explained — that a country is owned by its first inhabitants — “can be an acceptable reason for claiming collective ownership of a territory and this claim can have negative consequences for newcomers. Children might reason that a place belongs to their in-group because ‘we’ were here first and therefore have negative out-group attitudes.”

A key example of how popular culture shapes perception in this sphere is the case of Native Americans or American Indians.

A European version of the Wild West

Long before cable television and the internet, Europeans had constructed their own American West, partly thanks to the novels of Karl May (1842–1912), which were read by both adults and children and became fixtures in many home libraries, not only in Germany and Austria, but across Europe, including Yugoslavia. May had not visited the American West before writing his most famous stories, yet his Apache hero Winnetou shaped generations of ideas about Native Americans. For instance, in North Macedonia there are women born in the 1970s named Vineta, after him.

Film adaptations based on cooperation of several European countries , festivals and theme parks helped keep this imagined world alive, as depicted in the following video that accompanies the New York Times article “ Lost in Translation: Germany’s Fascination with the American Old West ”:

The Hollywood perceptions of Native Americans were not based on one unchanging formula. Many early Westerns cast Native people as anonymous “merciless Indian savages” (wording from America’s Declaration of Independence), to the point of caricature. Later films depicted them either as victims of conquest or as recognizable ethnic groups and individuals with virtues, flaws and competing interests. Movies like “ A Man Called Horse ,” “ Little Big Man ,” “ Soldier Blue ,” and “ Jeremiah Johnson ” exemplified the shift in the 1970s. By the 1990s, “ Dances with Wolves ” and “ The Last of the Mohicans ” exemplified the mainstreaming of this sympathetic version to a mass audience, even as the “noble savage” became another stereotype.

European Western comics , including masterpieces like the French “ Blueberry ” or the Belgian “ Comanche ,” followed similar trajectories and, like the once-popular “ Spaghetti Westerns ,” Italian Western comics followed a closely related evolution. Series such as “ Tex ,” “ Zagor ,” “ Storia del West ,” and “ Ken Parker ” borrowed from cinema while developing varied Indigenous characters. These remained European fantasies, but improved storylines made Native people actors in history, as opposed to mere scenery or a single, faceless enemy. In Yugoslavia, where Italian comics had enormous readership , their moral language became familiar across generations.

Anti-colonialism, made locally

Yugoslav readers did not merely consume translated adventures. As imports from the West were not enough to satiate the hunger for comics, local production developed between the two World Wars, and continued during the era of socialist Yugoslavia.

For instance, artist Andrija Maurović (1901–1980) produced a wide range of visually accomplished Western and adventure comics. From 1978, the Novi Sad -based publisher Dnevnik commissioned local writers and artists to create licensed episodes of “The Great Blek” (“ Il Grande Blek ”), popularly known as “Yu Blek.” Forum and Marketprint also produced “ Tarzan ” comics from 1983 to 1990, which were incorporated into the global franchise.

These were commercial comics, circulated in a country that took pride in co-founding the Non-Aligned Movement and publicly celebrated solidarity with anti-colonial struggles. Tito’s tours of Africa and Asia projected messages of peace and partnership with newly independent states. Within this setting, stories about resistance to conquest echoed Yugoslavia’s foundational narrative of Partisan anti-fascism, liberation and coexistence:

This makes the 1990s especially uncomfortable to remember. Many people who embraced or enabled nationalist politics had grown up with “ brotherhood and unity ,” anti-colonial solidarity and popular heroes who protected the oppressed, showing that the infusion of human rights values into pop culture is not a vaccine against bigotry.

Anti-colonial language survives in contemporary nationalist politics, but often selectively . Western colonial crimes are invoked to portray “the West” as uniquely illegitimate and to answer criticism of Russia with whataboutism , while Russian conquest across Central Asia , the Caucasus and Siberia — and later, Russification of Asian and European peoples — drops out of the frame.

Convicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj provides a telling Serbian example: after describing the United States as a state built through the destruction of its Native population, he urged American Serbs to vote for Donald Trump , largely because of Trump’s position toward Russia. Fact-checking service Istinomer later documented the wider Serbian media mythology around Trump.

Variations of such narratives are also present in other Balkan countries, a contrast made sharper after Trump’s own expansionist rhetoric about Greenland and the Panama Canal. When colonial violence matters only when committed by a geopolitical opponent, anti-colonialism becomes an alibi rather than a principle.

Autochthony at home

From 19th-century nation-building through the breakup of Yugoslavia, competing national histories sought ever deeper roots. “Autochthonous” became a compliment, while “newcomer” or “guest” became an accusation. Claims of firstness did not mechanically cause violence, but they could provide moral cover for assimilation, expulsion and ethnic cleansing: if neighbors were seen as temporary intruders, removing them could be narrated as restoration rather than injustice. Research on post-Ottoman state-building shows how displacement, land redistribution and national homogenization were intertwined from as far back as the late 19th century.

From that point onward, Balkan nationalists repeatedly translated stories of continuity into “historical rights.” As heirs to ancient or medieval polities, modern nations supposedly held prior claims to their territories. Modern Greece was an early example , while later competing historiographies connected Serbs and Bulgarians to medieval empires, Romanians to Daco-Roman continuity , and Albanians to Illyrian descent . Recent “ antiquization ” asserted continuity of modern ethnic Macedonians to the kingdom of Alexander the Great.

However, maps of historical entitlement rarely matched the mixed populations living on the land. Forced assimilation, forced migration, population exchange or ethnic cleansing were crucial instruments of Balkan nation-state building from Greek independence to the aftermath of the Second World War, later revived during the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001). The vocabulary resurfaced with an international incident in 2014, when a drone carried a banner literally bearing the English word “autochthonous” above a map of “Greater Albania” during a European Championship football match between Serbia and Albania in Belgrade .

Genetic research has given these narratives a new, seemingly scientific vocabulary. Genuine findings about ancestry — or commercial estimates presented as science — are selectively interpreted as proof that a modern nation descends directly from an ancient population. For example, online amplification of claims by pseudohistorical conspiracy theories that directly connect contemporary Serbs with the prehistoric Vinča culture , styling them “the oldest people in Europe,” contradicts scientific evidence of Slavic migrations .

Assigning ethnic Macedonians and Greeks rival percentages of “ancient Macedonian” DNA ancestry reduces complex, shared histories into certificates of authenticity. Scientific uncertainty and centuries of mixture disappear; selected figures are then used to label neighbours as less native, foreign or even racially inferior. Population genetics can illuminate migration and ancestry , but it cannot transform prehistoric cultures into modern nations or decide who has greater rights to a territory.

The moving boundary between ‘host’ and ‘guest’

The Balkans are a dramatic case of how hate justified by nativism helped fuel actual wars, but similar “justifications” emerged elsewhere. Anti-migrant movements in France, Britain, or Germany need not claim descent from the first inhabitants to reach a similar conclusion: newcomers are less entitled than “natives.”

West Germany’s term Gastarbeiter , meaning “guest worker,” captured the contradiction. From the 1960s, workers from the Balkans and Turkey were recruited because they were needed, but permanent residence and naturalized citizenship was not assumed. Even their children and grandchildren could be treated as guests, while earlier migrants or their descendants joined the established “we” and rejected those arriving after them.

The deepest paradox is therefore European, not uniquely Balkan. In stories about the American West, “being there first” often identifies a dispossessed people deserving protection. In nationalist politics, the same idea can be claimed by a dominant group as a license to exclude.

History and attachment to land matter, but neither should become a ranking of human worth or a title deed for ethnic domination. The real test of humanity begins when the people whose rights are at stake are not distant figures in a film or comic, but one’s present-day neighbors.